Looking on your own

self

portrait

mystery

Nochrisis

We humans are good at recognizing faces. We often recognize a face by just an outline, a shadow or on a blurry picture. We recognize ourselves in almost the same way, we know who we are, looking from the outside at the outside.

There is a big difference between recognizing an other and yourself I think. If I see a shape of someone that I know I immediately have some kind of synopsis available with all there trades, our shared history and everything else worth remembering. We have a (one sided) judgment ready when we meet people we know, and we have a lot of drafts ready to grab when we meet people we don’t know.

But when I look in the mirror, I realize that, that is the only time when meeting someone, myself, that I am honest. I have no “synopsis” or “judgment”, at most a poorly written draft of who that is, in the mirror.